Audience Theories

Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies.
Whether you are constructing a text or analysing one, you will need to consider the destination of that text, for example its target audience and how that audience will respond to that text.

Within audience theories, there are plenty of other theories which I will be explaining about. There is The Hypodermic Needle Model, which was first revealed and created in the 1920’s; this theory was the first attempt to explain how mass audiences might react to mass media. This particular theory, as it is known to be so powerful, also creates a lot of moral panics within the society.

The Two-Step-Flow audience theory, firstly created by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet who had many doubts about The Hypodermic Needle Model, as they thought it was gradually beginning to get too clumsy for media researchers, a therefore not so reliable towards the audience.

Along these 2 effective audience theories, there is also, Uses & Gratifications, and ideas for this audience theory were built around the 1960’s, and now obviously since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, particularly as new media forms have come along, for example video games and the internet.

There is also The Reception Theory, which emphasises the reader’s reception of a literacy text. Extending the concept of an active audience still further, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way of making the audience properly understand a text, and how their individual circumstances affected their reading.